Mr. Corridor’s best-known hits with the second-wave ska revival group embrace “Gangsters” (1979), “Too A lot Too Younger” (1980) and “Ghost City” (1981), a observe whose bleak lyrics got here to embody the sense of alienation gripping England’s postindustrial cities and cities. It was a haunting soundtrack to the summer season of riotous unrest that gripped neighborhoods within the nation’s cities one month after its launch.
1000’s of largely Black younger folks clashed in riots with law enforcement officials in additional than 20 British cities that summer season, as unemployment charges soared and tensions with police boiled over, leading to the arrests of greater than 1,200 folks.
“Ghost City,” which catapulted the Specials to huge recognition, was recorded over 10 days in April 1981 in central England’s Leamington Spa, in accordance with a historical past of the band shared on its web site.
“It captured how we had been feeling — not simply in Coventry, however we had been touring within the north and noticed all these factories closing down, all these folks turning into unemployed,” Mr. Corridor informed the Huge Problem journal in a 2021 interview.
The observe, which spent three weeks on the prime of the British charts, was finally what led the band to breaking apart — a choice made by its members in a dressing room following a reside musical look on the tv program “Prime of the Pops,” the Specials stated.
“We had been anticipated to get a gold disc for that report, however I discovered that fairly horrible. Why do we’d like that reward?” Mr. Corridor recalled within the 2021 interview. “Our nation’s in a multitude, do you want my gold report? It felt like the proper second to cease.”
“We’d gone from seven children at the back of a van to being introduced with gold discs,” he added, “and I by no means felt massively snug with that.”
Along with being the frontman with the Specials — which disbanded in 1981 earlier than regrouping in 2009 — Mr. Corridor carried out with bands Enjoyable Boy Three, the Colourfield and Vegas.
Terence Edward Corridor was born in Coventry, England, on March 19, 1959, to a household that labored within the metropolis’s then-thriving automobile business.
In 2019, he stated in interviews that he had been kidnapped by a trainer at 12 and brought to France, the place he was sexually abused for 4 days earlier than being deserted on a roadside. The trauma left him in a state of despair and hooked on Valium, which he had been prescribed. “I didn’t go to highschool, I didn’t do something,” he stated. “I simply sat on my mattress rocking for eight months.”
He wrote about his anguish in “Properly Fancy That!,” recorded in 1983 by Enjoyable Boy Three. The lyrics embrace the traces: “On college journeys to France/ Properly fancy that/ You had fun/ Turned intercourse into crime.”
Mr. Corridor stated he suffered from psychological sickness a lot of his life. He held odd jobs, together with apprentice hairdresser, earlier than deciding to pursue music after seeing the Intercourse Pistols in live performance.
The Specials fused components of Sixties-era ska — with its roots in Jamaican dance music and imported American R&B — with British punk. The ensuing 2-Tone motion, so named for the biracial lineups of its bands, turned in style on the nation’s radio stations within the late Nineteen Seventies, and was referred to as ska’s “second wave.”
Identified for making a soundtrack that captured the temper of the late Nineteen Seventies, the Specials had been one among Britain’s most outstanding multiracial music teams, and plenty of of its songs grappled with modern racist violence. Mr. Corridor shared frontman duties with Neville Staple, a Jamaican-born Black performer who specialised in toasting, a mode of rapping.
“Simply since you’re a Black boy, simply since you’re a White boy, it doesn’t imply you’ve bought to hate him, it doesn’t imply you’ve bought to struggle,” Mr. Corridor sang in “Doesn’t Make it Alright,” one of many Specials’ slower tracks.
In a 2021 interview with the Monetary Instances, he described how the band’s music gigs had been focused by racist hooligans.
“It bought actually excessive,” Mr. Corridor recalled. “We had been taking part in with Insanity in a college city someplace, we walked offstage and there have been casualties all around the dressing room. Individuals who had been lower and slashed. It seemed like an emergency room. It was heartbreaking, the very last thing we wished to see.”
British musician Billy Bragg described the Specials as “a celebration of how British tradition was invigorated by Caribbean immigration,” in a Twitter tribute posted to Mr. Corridor. The musician’s onstage demeanor, he added, “was a reminder that they had been within the severe enterprise of difficult our notion of who we had been within the late Nineteen Seventies.”